TV Radio Mirror (Jul - Dec 1956)

The Spirit of Romance (Continued from -page 35) past few years. Nina has helped greatly." Mrs. Lipton is the former Nina Foch — •and still Nina Foch, the actress. When she catches Jim disappearing, she laughs him right out of it. He says, "I have an insincere smile that I use when I'm lost — you know I'm thinking about something else. Maybe Nina says something and I give her this smile. Well, she knows what it means and she mimics me. And she won't quit. I gave up smoking for gumchewing and, when I get lost, I get to chewing pretty hard — and she mimics this, too. She keeps it up for ten minutes or more. Until she gets me laughing. And then she mimics my laugh!" The Liptons have been married since June 12, 1954, and they have a good marriage. Both are artists and individualists, but they make a successful go of their marriage. "Nina has her day, too," Jim notes. "She doesn't get lost as I do, but she can blow up like a summer storm. She can have an emotional explosion which stuns me — and then, a minute later, be as happy as a lark. Of course, I'm in favor of the explosion. Nina was too shy when we first married. She gave in too easily. I was always saying, 'Now are you sure you want to go there?'" Jim puts as much thought into his marriage as he does into his career. And most of the time his motor is running. He usually has a half-dozen projects going. During the past year, he continued his studies, finished an original play, adapted a Moliere play and then directed it. He's been Dick Grant in both the radio and TV versions of The Guiding Light. Nina also leads a hectic life. "Sometimes we don't see each other to talk to until weekends," Jim says ruefully. "Or we may meet at a class in the evening and say 'good morning' for the first time." Jim's schedule is a full one. He is at the TV studio at 8:45 A.M. for The Guiding Light rehearsals. The show goes on at 12:45. He's off the air at one, of course. But, until just recently, there was then a mad dash to rehearse and broadcast the radio version of The Guiding Light. At this writing, a good part of his afternoon is still devoted to TV rehearsals for the next day's show. In the evenings, there are voice lessons with Arthur Lessac, fencing lessons, ballet, gymnastics, and modern dance. He will probably run into Nina at the ballet class, or at 11:30 P.M. in Harold Clurman's acting workshop. They are at Clurman's until two in the morning. It makes for a frenetic life, but things are accomplished — and the marriage works. "I figure a good marriage has two possibilities," he says. "There is one in which one person, usually the man, calls all the turns and the wife keeps up the home. Or there is our kind, where we are making a continual and conscious effort to live equally and share the burdens. What I mean is: Whoever gets out of bed last in the morning makes it. At dinner time, we work together in the kitchen, eat and clean up together." They have been living in a two-anda-half-room apartment at Seventy-second Street and Park Avenue. Any way you look at it, Park Avenue is a far cry from Jim's beginning. "As a kid," Jim recalls, "I lived in a tough neighborhood. The school I went to was the second toughest in all of Detroit. We had thievery. Sluggings. Knifings. It was tough." Jim was born in Detroit, September 9, 1926. His parents separated when he was three. He was raised wholly by his mother. She is a college graduate who then taught grade school and worked as a librarian. "She is a splendid woman," Jim says. "I am very indebted to her. She was the good influence in my life." Because his mother worked, Jim was alone much of the time. She provided him with books, but it didn't keep him out of the streets. "The gangs did a lot of fighting," he remembers. "My behavior wasn't the best. However, I drew the line at dishonesty." This wasn't easy during Depression days, for Mrs. Lipton and son were poor as church mice. They lived on skimpy rations. They had no luxuries. The summer he was thirteen, Jim Lipton got his first job. He worked in a photo-engraving plant at twelve dollars a week. He washed photographic glass in nitric acid. This turned his hands yellow — but that was nothing compared to the pain when he frequently cut his hands on ohipped or broken plates of glass and the acid got into the wound. Another chore was to sweep up. He was at this job, near the end of the summer, when his job vanished. He was sweeping up the floor — and suddenly there was no floor. The plant had blown up. Luckily for Jim, he wasn't hurt. "That was the year we moved, too," he recalls. "To a very small apartment, but in a better neighborhood. We had been living with my grandparents, and it was the first year my mother and I had any kind of privacy. When Christmas came, I insisted that we had to have a tree. Well, there was only a quarter for the tree, so I put off shopping until late Christmas Eve, when prices come down." He had acquired one string of six lights, one box of small colored balls and one box of icicles. What Jim got for his quarter was a tree that stood about sixfeet high with five or six branches— and about as many needles to each branch. This he took home and, together with his mother, he hung the balls and draped the tinsel. They strung the lights vertically, straight up the trunk. "Mother and I played it straight, too. We both admired the tree and said, 'How wonderful!' Christmas morning, one of my uncles came over and we showed him the ridiculous-looking tree. He said nothing. He sat down. His mouth was working and he was trying to control himself, but he couldn't. He burst out laughing. He was staring at the tree and laughing. Then I laughed and so did Mother. We laughed till we fell out of our chairs." From the age of ten, Jim's ambition was to be a lawyer. That year, his mother had been ill. He was sent away, to spend the summer with an uncle in California. The uncle was an attorney and — compared with Jim's Detroit home^lived in great luxury. So Jim decided he, too, would study law. In grade and high schools, however, he worked in dramatic productions. Ernie Ricca, now a New Yorker and director of The Romance Of Helen Trent, was head of production at Detroit's Station WWJ. He heard Jim, who was sixteen, on a high-school radio show and invited him to audition for professional work. Within a year, Jim was making about sixty dollars a week as the nephew of The Lone Ranger. Continuing his radio work, Jim enrolled in an accelerated pre-legal course at Wayne University and was a sophomore when he enlisted as an air cadet. That was during World War II. Jim was still a cadet when the war ended a year later, and he was discharged before winning his wings. "I went back to Detroit for a week," he remembers. "Just one week. I couldn't. 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